Productive Void

Like Los rubios, the “disappearance” of the narrator’s friend is the the void around which the book is constructed. “M”, the friend of the narrator is the present absence at the center of the narration.

In both Los rubios and Los plantetas, the inability to conjure the person via memory is not only about absence but about the excess of memory. In the same way Carri’s search failed, becoming an assortment of loose ends, fragments which did not add up to a whole but overlapped and fell apart, the narrator of Los planetas  gets lost in the unlimited possibilities of the past. What Nouzeilles writes about Los rubios could also be applied to Los planetas:

Excess does not mean fullness. When meaning explodes, it always leaves, scattered all of the surface of our recollections, the gaps of the failure to remember or the baffling certainties of remembering otherwise. 266

Los planetas is fiction and its narrator relies on literary language to represent the unrepresentable which, as Erin points out in her essay, is intimately connected with issues of identity and difference.  Just as Carri signals the limits of documentary working with issues of identity and memory, Cheijfec  utilized, then points to the limits of literary discourse. I also found thinking of the void in terms of unrepresentability (per Badiou), or as the Real useful, as it positions the void as productive. The void which “cannot be approached” but which “can be signaled again and again and again” (Graff Zivin 81).

Topografía y escritura: Llenando el vacío con un mapa de memorias

           La novela topográfica de Sergio Chefjec Los Planetas funciona como una búsqueda bizantina a través de las calles de Buenos Aires, donde el lector entra y sale por callejones con la intención no de llegar a un límite o un lugar fijo sino de recolectar memorias de dichos callejones que desaparecen a medida que viremos en la próxima esquina. Es un ejercicio en la futilidad del pasado pero también una afirmación de su resurrección a través de las palabras escritas. El narrador escribe: “nadie imaginaba que al cabo de los años estas caminatas terminarían así, adoptando la forma de palabras puestas sobre papel” (Chefjec 149). Es una búsqueda tan inútil como la del padre de M tratando de hallar su auto robado pero igualmente exhaustiva y sin fin, como el laberinto del mundo literario.  El seguir recordando y relatando la presencia de M no lo va a materializar ni tampoco le va a traer justicia. Simplemente sirve para mantenerlo presente, para llenar ese vacío que su desaparición ha creado. Chefjec no tiene más opción sino que llenar ese espacio de ausencia con sus palabras, un frenesí de historias fascinantes hiladas por su amistad con M, por su intercambiabilidad con M. El desparecido pudo haber sido él. La novela tiene un carácter aleatorio que no sólo refleja la topografía escurridiza de la ciudad sino la fugacidad de las memorias. Lo escrito reemplaza la historia, lo desaparecido, lo olvidado. Con palabras le damos inmortalidad a lo perdido. 

HIJOS & "Escraches"

To see a video of this escrache taking place on May 21, 2008, click here.

 

 

In her article “Postmemory Cinema and the Future of the Past in Albertina Carri’s Los Rubios” Gabriela Nouzeilles explores the film “Los Rubios” in relation to postmemory and the problem of discourse in postdictatorship Latin America.  Also, in order to frame her reading, Nouzeilles brings up the topic of “the disappeared” and describes how “the widespread acceptance the term ‘disappeared’, coined by the military juntas, represents a second form of death, a symbolic one, for the victims of the dictatorship’s mass killings” (264).  Perhaps it is necessary to linger for a moment on what Nouzeilles is implying here.  For “the disappeared” to take on a second, symbolic death is radical in many ways—the first of which having to do with the concept of death as a term and within the human condition.  Death is the most finite of human states, an end to all possibility.  For the term “disappeared” to come about, a plurality must have come into being—a questioning of the state of being dead, which also must apply in parallel to the state of being alive.  The existential unhinging of both these concepts is brought about by resistance in the face of dictatorship and also the uncertain question of what it is to be alive or to be dead under dictatorship.  Is living under dictatorship truly living?  In that case, what does it mean to be dead under the same conditions—conditions in which you were never free to live your life in the first place?

Nouzeilles describes how the formation of the activist group HIJOS, an acronym for “Hijos por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence)” became one result and point of resistance in the wake of the disappearances (265).  This group was “formed by sons and daughters of the disappeared” and “has defined itself through the realization of estraches, performative street events whose goal is to reveal the scandal of yet another public secret, by denouncing the criminal behavior of those who collaborated with the military regime (physicians, torturers, military officers, etc.) and who continue to live among regular citizens unaffected by the consequences of their criminal actions” (265).  In this way, there is a provocative turning on the term and concept of “the disappeared.”  Through the estraches, these sons and daughters are forcing the opposite of a disappearance; they are imposing a reappearance, a revealing, a spotlighting of the perpetrators who erased their lost family members from their lives.  This spotlighting has necessitated itself because after the dictatorship, the military regime also attempted to disappear its entire tainted population—the “physicians, torturers, military officers” that Nouzeilles describes—back into society.  For the regime to erase its corrupted past and have a chance at rebirth, for their mistakes to simply disappear, but their lives to go on, is at the core of the injustice that HIJOS is pushing back against.

In anticipation of Los Rubios and ‘los rubios’

(*I have never seen Los Rubios so my comments will only reflect a reaction to the essay)

            In her essay Postmemory Cinema and the Future of the Past, Gabriela Nouzeilles points out the metafictional (actually, this term is incorrect, cause the film is neither a written text nor a fiction so to speak, so perhaps we should call it metafilmic or metanonfiction… an interesting notion as well) aspects of Los rubios by focusing on “the mirror effect created by the arrangement of the movie within the movie, looking for ‘Los rubios’, the equivocal parents,” that turns out to be “indistinguishable from looking for ‘Los rubios’, the elusive movie” (p. 269). She also pinpoints three versions of Albertina Carri: author (the filmmaker outside the documentary), auteur (her presence as a documentary subject within the documentary when it depicts the documentary making itself) and character (played by an actress in “reenactments” it seems). These “selves” that reflect upon each other seem to be approximations toward a reconstruction of the past via the generation left behind by ‘the disappeared,” the offspring of the victims of the horrors of the Argentinean dictatorship that escape representation. This insistence on keeping the term ‘los desaparecidos’ as opposed to victims or the dead (given the impossibility of an unveiling of cadavers, the end product, so the viewer - and the children of the disappeared - can hold witness and in a way have peace) reflects the absurdity of this process that Nouzelles calls postmemory. How can Albertina remember her parents, their cause, and their demise when she was not a direct witness to any of it? I’m very intrigued by how the film starts as a search for the past and becomes “performative” and humorous as a way to repair the mourning that was lost (the loss of the loss in a way, another reflection of a reflection like the 3 Albertinas). The self-reflexivity employed by the documentary seems to reflect on the very nature of memory, its reproduction on camera, testimony and truth. Given that none of these are possible in the case of ‘los desaparecidos’ (the documentary can’t even pin down the true color of the parents’ hair), these representations of “the unrepresented” by Carri are “the result of creative memory” which makes them, Nouzelles argues, “ ‘true’ to the past” (p. 270). Truth therefore is arrived through these mirror reflections established by the documentary-within-the-documentary (much like Hamlet’s play-within-the-play is used to get ‘proof’ that Claudius murdered Hamlet’s father). Truth (or, more accurately, some semblance of it) is arrived by pointing the camera back unto itself. We know how this works on fiction (as we saw last week with Gabriela Basterra’s lecture on Las meninas), but what happens here when it is applied to non-fiction and film. I cannot wait to see it on friday.

Trauma and the Process of Becoming a Sign

In the article “Auto-Heteronomy, or Levinas’ Philosphy of the Same” Gabriela Basterra writes that the role of trauma in the signification process is “central” because “the signifying and affective dimensions are inextricably linked: paradigmatic substitutions depend on affect because they are ruled by the unconscious” (121).  If the role that trauma plays in this signification transformation works at a level that is unconscious and affective, what does that mean in regards to the autonomy of the signifier? Is the process of “becoming a sign” as the result of trauma a kind of Rube Goldberg Machine that once initiated is impossible to escape?

According to Basterra, the subject speaks to its trauma, or as Levinas describes, the subject must make “signs of signification itself… to the point of becoming a sign” (121).  This raises the question as to what constitutes a sign of signification.  Must the subject speak to their trauma or is it something that can be totally unavoidable, like a physical lesion across the body?  The word trauma itself comes from the Greek word titrōskein meaning “wound.”  Although in the modern use of the word trauma is considered something which can be hidden—which can maintain a secret, signified interior—the Greek root of “wound” is more physically present and more difficult to conceal.  Perhaps the inevitability of becoming the sign through trauma can be explained by this concept of being wounded and thus being changed, acknowledgement of such change is not necessary in the paradigm and not reversible or capable of healing.

Ethics and Alterity

The excess of subjectivity that exceeds representation reminded me of our class discussion on 68’ a couple of weeks ago, and the way in which the excess of political and student movements were delineated in France, regulated and diminished through representation (which I think is related to Basterra’s idea of differential representation), or the way 68 in Mexico is posteriorly reduced to the single image of the massacre at Tlatelolco.

Along the same lines, I am interested in the idea that an ethical event cannot be represented but its impact on the world can be signified rhetorically.

The demand comes from the other-that which resists representation.  It is also the other in the same- within the subject. You only know the demand through the disturbance it creates- (which makes me think of our discussion of the subaltern-the position of the subaltern in history as the ‘winds of change’ etc.)

I am a little confused by the discussion of the alterity of the event being outside and inside the subject (“The alterity of this event is, however, an alterity within the self: the command is “exerted by the other in me over me”. Existing in the subject but in excess of it this other alters the subject as an Other-within-the same…” This thing that exists within the subject and in excess of it seemed like Derrida’s idea of the supplement- the unnatural outside addition that both corrects a lack or absence, and is in excess.  Later, Basterra states that Derrida’s critique of Levinas was that by saying the other is always at a distance and not within the ego, and if it is untouchable and not within the ego, how can we know it exists?

The Other Within as a Parasite

          In Gabriela Basterra’s discussion of Levinas’ rhetoric employed in Otherwise than Being, she analyses the metaphors used by Levinas to describe the ethical event as an act of Auto-Heteronomy. The external “face” in Totality and Infinity becomes an elusive “trace” in Otherwise than Being that now highlights the impact of the ethical event on the subject, what is left behind but it is still absent, catachresis. We see a movement from an other that is exterior to an other that resides within the subject, embedded beneath the “skin.” In attempting to myself visualize what Basterra is describing, I see the ethical event operating auto-heteronomically as a parasitical other that has incepted itself within the subject commanding it from within it’s own voice. 

           I was most intrigued by where she goes in page 123 when redefining Kant’s idea of autonomy in the presence of an ethical act as a reaction to a command that comes from an other that lies within hence allowing the self to not only be conscious of itself as the subject receiving the command but act as its author simultaneously. I was primarily interested in how the conscious inaccessibility of that which generates the ethical obligation gets distorted as a cruel other inflicting guilt. If guilt is a result of catachresis, an absence of representation of that other from which the ethical event generates, then the subcutaneous alterity that makes possible this hetero-autonomous event can be viewed as a parasite, an alien corrupting its host, an other of unknown origin.